Modern Genetics: TOPIC 5

5. Benefits and risk of the genetic modification And cloning in animals and plants.
---Benefits and risk of the genetic modification:

Ø Benefits:

· Mammals have been successfully cloned and the human genome project has been completed. This is pushing the scientists all over the world to research many different facets of human genetic engineering. These researches have allowed a better understanding of DNA and its role in medicine, pharmacology, reproductive technology and various other fields.

· In humans, the most promising benefit of genetic engineering is gene therapy which is the medical treatment of a disease wherein the defective genes are repaired and replaced or therapeutic genes are introduced to fight the disease. Over the past decade, many autoimmune and heart diseases have been treated using gene therapy.

· Thanks to genetic engineering, the pharmaceutical products available today are far superior to their predecessors. These new products are created by cloning certain genes. Some of the prominent examples are the bio-engineered insulin which was earlier obtained from sheep or cows and the human growth hormone which was earlier obtained from cadavers.

· Genetic engineering when used on microorganisms help in the creation of new pharmaceuticals which cannot be made in any other way.

· Genetic engineering helps in the process of bioremediation which is the process of cleaning up waste and pollution with the help of living organisms.

Well it is very important if you can watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhoVcL7Ssmk
I can not put that and another video here in this blog because it is so heavy for blogger.

· Genetic engineering has helped lower the overall usage of herbicide and pesticide.

· Genetic engineering has helped with the production of vaccines and other drugs in plants.

· Genetic engineering has helped produce quicker and more predictable way of generating new cultivars. Further, the cultivar properties are better known today than it was ever known before.

· Today, genetic engineering can produce sustainable agriculture.

· Genetic engineering has produced very useful genetically modified breeds which can tolerate factory farming without any suffering.

· In humans, genetic engineering is used to treat genetic disorders and cancer. It also helps in supplying new body parts.

· Although, this has not been done today, genetic engineering has the potential of creating new types of human beings with many advantageous traits.

· The field of agriculture too greatly benefits from genetic engineering which has improved the genetic fitness of various plant species. The common benefits are increase in the efficiency of photosynthesis, increasing the resistance of the plant to salinity, drought and viruses and also reducing the plant’s need for a nitrogen fertilizer.

Ø Risks:

· New Allergens in the Food Supply: Transgenic crops could bring new allergens into foods that sensitive individuals would not know to avoid.

· Biological war: There is still the risk of a biological war, because all days there is a lot of advances in the genetical fields.

· Antibiotic Resistance: Genetic engineering often uses genes for antibiotic resistance as "selectable markers." Early in the engineering process, these markers help select cells that have taken up foreign genes.

· Production of New Toxins: Many organisms have the ability to produce toxic substances. For plants, such substances help to defend stationary organisms from the many predators in their environment

· Concentration of Toxic Metals: Some of the new genes being added to crops can remove heavy metals like mercury from the soil and concentrate them in the plant tissue.

· Enhancement of the Environment for Toxic Fungi: Although for the most part health risks are the result of the genetic material newly added to organisms, it is also possible for the removal of genes and gene products to cause problems.

· Creation of New or Worse Viruses: One of the most common applications of genetic engineering is the production of virus-tolerant crops. Such crops are produced by engineering components of viruses into the plant genomes. For reasons not well understood, plants producing viral components on their own are resistant to subsequent infection by those viruses.

· Unknown Harms to the Environment: As with human health risks, it is unlikely that all potential harms to the environment have been identified. Each of the potential harms above is an answer to the question, "Well, what might go wrong?" The answer to that question depends on how well scientists understand the organism and the environment into which it is released. At this point, biology and ecology are too poorly understood to be certain that question has been answered comprehensively.

· Risk Assessment: Having identified a list of possible harms that might occur as a result of using or releasing genetically engineered organisms, the next question is how likely are any of these to occur? Like the original "brainstorming" of potential harms, the answer to this question depends greatly on how well the organisms and their interaction in the environment are understood. Risks must be assessed case by case as new applications of genetic engineering are introduced. In some circumstances, it is possible to assess risks with great confidence. For example, it is vanishingly unlikely that genetically engineered palm trees will thrive in the Arctic regardless of what genes have been added. But for many potential harms, the answers are far less certain.

--Cloning In animals and plants:

Cloning can be defined as the process that achieves identical copies of a body already developed, so asexual. These two features are important:

It is part of an animal and developed because cloning responds to an interest in obtaining copies of a specific animal that interests us, and only when an adult know their characteristics.

http://www.animalcloning.info/Animal-cloning-process.html

On the other hand, it is so asexual. Sexual reproduction does not allow us to get identical copies, as this type of reproduction by its very nature generates diversity.

To better understand this need to recall briefly how "is made" a living being. A certain animal is comprised of millions of cells, which are like the bricks that form the building that is being alive. Such cells have very different aspects and functions. However, they all have one thing in common: their nuclei have a long string containing accurate information on how and how is the body: the DNA. Each cell contains all the information about how it is and how it develops throughout the body to which it belongs.

---Animal Cloning:

Initial attempts at artificially induced Animal Cloning were done using developing embryonic cells. The DNA nucleus was extracted from an embryonic cell and implanted into an unfertilized egg, from which the existing nucleus had already been removed. The process of fertilization was simulated by giving an electric shock or by some chemical treatment method. The cells that developed from this artificially induced union were then implanted into host mothers. The cloned animal that resulted had a genetic make-up exactly identical to the genetic make-up of the original cell.

NNow animal cloning can be done both for reproductive and non-reproductive or therapeutic purposes. In the second case, cloning is done to produce stem cells or other such cells that can be used for therapeutic purposes, for example, for healing or recreating damaged organs; the intention is not to duplicate the whole organism.

--- Plants cloning:

Cloning your own plants is easier than it sounds, and can be done with a variety of indoor or outdoor plants. With just a few simple steps along with the help of a little water and sunlight, you can clone an existing plant into a new one--and save money in the process.

Many plants clone themselves naturally to reproduce. They send a small shoot-like structure, called a runner, along the soil. The runner grows into a new separate plant that is genetically identical to the original plant. In other words, it is a clone.